Third-person narration enables thinking inequality and social position

Evidence

Economic inequalities, academic hierarchies, empiricist epistemes, and individualized perception become thinkable in the third person, that bird mode which constitutively defies the immediately observable. Conceptual vectors of queerness, race, class, and the mobility truths and lies of the university thwart any effort to congeal this story as the private magnetism of an isolated sufferer; the entrenched habit of correlating Black art to Black artists’ biographies is similarly destabilized by Real Life’s refusal to personalize. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 353

Categorization

• XREF: This is the positive case for mediated, third-person form that will feed the reader’s defense of mediation against immediacy — connects to her need to articulate why mediation is politically necessary.